Hunt 5AM Limitless wheels review: How do the fastest wheels in the wind tunnel fare in the real world?

Hunt has been pushing the boundaries of the best road bike wheels for a while now. I remember kicking about on a set of Limitless wheels a few years ago, before wide road tyres had really taken off, and marvelling at how when I looked down I could see more rim than tyre. Wind on a couple of years and now it has come out with the 5AM Limitless wheelset, with the ‘5’ roughly denoting the depth and the ‘AM’ definitely not standing for ‘Aero Mullet’, but rather ‘Aero Maximised’.

Like it or not, the road mullet trend is here to stay, and this is another new wheelset with a deeper front wheel than rear. Hunt makes some bold claims, but we can park them for a second as the 5AM Limitless Ti-UD Carbon Spoke Disc (to give it its full title) came out as the fastest road bike wheels in our recent wind tunnel test. Wind tunnel numbers can only tell you so much, so I slapped ‘em on a Dura-Ace equipped Look Blade 795 RS, in place of the Scope Artech 6.A wheels it came with (I know, this job is hard and miserable and awful) and gave them a good seeing to.

The short version is they back up on the road what they promised in the tunnel. Well behaved, lithe and responsive, without that nagging feeling of fragility I sort of felt under me with the Scopes.

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Design and aesthetics

Let’s start with the aesthetics before we move onto the design; these are good looking wheels. Maybe you don’t agree, but you’re not the one writing this review. The vast majority of road and gravel wheels now are matter black hoops with a white logo. Not only are these not black, but a lovely almost steel blue-grey, but they’re gloss. Long have I craved for gloss carbon to make a comeback, because it’s so much easier to live with. Moreover the logos are applied under the lacquer, which makes them look and feel more premium. I always find it incredibly frustrating when the logos start chipping off a set of Scope Artechs relatively swiftly, or even more so how a set of £4k Enve wheels just have vinyl stickers slapped on ‘em; it feels cheap.

The vaguely '80s vibe of the grey continues to the hubs, which also look very smart with the colour matched disc rotor lockrings. I know aesthetics don’t actually make any difference to performance, but I think if we’re all honest with ourselves we all want a set of wheels that look the business.

The rim dimensions are pushing the limits of what a ‘5’ designation can comfortably cover, with a 58mm deep front and a 55mm deep rear. While this is technically road mullet, in practice not even my beady eyes can perceive a 3mm difference in rim depth unless the bike is up against a wall and I’m thinking about it intently.

Width-wise, the front and rear differ slightly, too, with a 34.5mm external width up front for a claimed greater stability in the wind, and a 30mm at the rear, which I assume is also a play to keep the weight down as a system. Both rims have a 23mm internal width, and are hooked. This perhaps isn’t as wide as you’d like if you’re pushing the limits of road tyre widths, but if you’re cutting about on something 28-32mm it’s just right, and I suspect most of you considering buying these probably are.

The system weight is a claimed 1,212g (574g front, 638g rear). On our scales they weighed in at 1,229g, which is certainly acceptably close to the claim. It also makes them 78g lighter than a set of Scope Artech 6.A wheels, which have for some time been a personal benchmark for being both extremely aerodynamic and very lightweight.

Part of this weight saving is down to the low spoke counts; just 15 at the front, with a scant 5 on the non-disc side. At the rear you get a mere 18, with a 2:1 ratio on the driveside vs rotor side. In this guise the spokes are bladed carbon with Ti hardware at the hub end and hidden alloy nipples at the rim for another aero boost. The hubs can be upgraded from steel bearings to ceramic from Ceramicspeed, but come with low contact seals in either case. I tested the steel versions.

I shan’t spoil all the aero details, but if you are a real watt watcher and want to deep dive into just how these wheels performed then I implore you to go and read Josh’s incredibly detailed writeup of our latest wheels wind tunnel test. The short digest for the purposes of the review is that with a 28mm tyre fitted these Hunts were the fastest on test. The margins are small over the competition, but that’s how the data falls.

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Performance

I’ve ridden a fair few very good wheelsets in my time, and while Hunt has been making fast wheels for some time it hasn’t necessarily had something in the superwheel category until now; something to challenge the Scopes of this world. Perhaps this is also because it does such a good job at disseminating its budget friendly wheels about the place that it slightly diminishes its more premium offerings, but here, with the 5AM Limitless, it has a superwheel that’s absolutely up there with the best wheels on the market.

I’m not going to claim I can feel the difference in aerodynamics between these and a set of Artechs; I can’t, and you wouldn’t believe me if said I could anyway, but from a performance standpoint these are the fastest by the tunnel data, and when paired with a bike of the calibre of the Look Blade 795 RS they absolutely flew along. The aero is a given, but they’re so good in so many other ways that I find them so hard to overlook in the ‘best road wheels on the market’ conversation.

First of all they’re hooked. Say what you like about hookless being fine if you do everything right, and I have never had an incident with hookless wheels (because I’ve done everything right) but I’d just rather have hooked road wheels and have one less thing to worry about. They’re also wider internally than the new Roval Rapide CLX III, which my colleague Tom noted made them perhaps a little dated already.

They’re also just about the lightest wheels we tested, besides the CRW Works Ultimo 6060. Weight isn’t everything, but to be the most aero and near as dammit the lightest too is quite something, and out on the road they feel much like the Scopes did when I had them fitted to a Pinarello Dogma F; fast on the flat, and then this feeling that they just keep being fast on whatever gradient you like.

Flat blasts are a joy, and while they aren’t as stable in the wind as the delightfully placid Reserves that I rode on the Cervélo S5, they’re extremely well behaved, but they also feel incredible if you like hitting out on punchy climbs. I matched my best ever time up my local test, a 200m all-out sprint at 12% average, maxing out at 17% in places. Close your eyes and you have a shallow, hyper-responsive climbing wheel.

I was a little worried the low spoke count might make them feel a little less stiff. They don’t feel quite as stiff as a set of Artechs, but this may also be a perception thing as I mostly just felt like I felt less road buzz and chatter through them, which to my eyes is a good thing. They’re more than stiff enough for all-out sprints, and feel great in cornering without being overly jittery.

They’re quiet, too. I have had a set of Hunt hubs in the past that were so loud they made a toddler cry as I rode past. The Scopes are louder even than those, but the Chase SLC hubs here are only moderately loud. If I had my way they’d be silent, but that’s not how ratchets work. The 7.5º engagement angle is sufficient for road, and I never felt like I was caught floating between teeth.

I also am pleased to say I accidentally tested the durability of these wheels. After a Wednesday night hill sprint session, followed by a couple of beers, I went to get some delicious takeaway Szechuan hot pot. So distracted was I by the promise of a warming, savoury, numbing broth (and absolutely nothing to do with the beers on an empty stomach after exercise) that I rode straight into a curb head on. It wasn’t overly fast, but it was hard, and I am pleased to say I neither dropped my soup nor broke the front wheel.

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Value

More aero than anything else we tested. Lighter than all but one of the cohorts we tested, with performance on the road that backs up the lab testing numbers, combined with good looks, and all for a price that’s cheaper than the equivalent from Reserve, Parcours, DT Swiss, Roval, Scope, Vision, and Syncros. The only cheaper wheels we tested were Chinese brands, and they didn’t perform all that well in aero terms. Even with the ceramic bearing upgrade they’re still cheaper than most in this performance bracket, so it’s hard to not give them full marks for value.

I am writing this assuming of course that you’re after the fastest, or indeed the lightest. There’s every chance you perhaps budgeted a lot less that £2k and found your mind wandering, and in broad terms the differences are tangible but small to cheaper wheels. While we haven’t directly compared, the wattage gulf will be one that is easily traversed, perhaps a couple of watts in it really, and a small gram penalty too thanks to the law of diminishing returns. Despite this it’s hard to not see these as exceptionally good value wheels given how well they perform against far more premium competition.

Verdict

I think these might be the best road wheels on the market right now. Maybe Hunt doesn’t have the brand cachet of Reserve, Roval, or Vision, but it’s created a set of wheels that rides fantastically on all terrain, with sensational aero and weight figures that beat the competition in almost all circumstances, and all for a price that’s lower than almost all the mainstream competition too.

My caveat to this is that, for example, if you were building up an S-Works Tarmac SL9, then a set of Rovals will have been designed to work with that frame in a way that may surpass what these are capable of. Likewise the Reserves in the Cervélo S5, but even then the price differential is such that I could look past it, as there’s almost £1,000 between these and a set of Rovals.